I'm director of content strategy at startup Exitround. I was previously a staff reporter at Forbes covering start-ups and venture capital. I'm interested in entrepreneurs who want to change the world, or have a point of view or compelling story. Email me at tgeron.news@gmail.com. I was previously a reporter for Dow Jones VentureWire where my work also appeared in the Wall Street Journal. I've also written for Red Herring, the Long Beach Press-Telegram and other outlets. In a former life I was a web developer. Follow me on Twitter tomiogeron, or Facebook , or Google+.

StartX Launches The Best Of Stanford Startups

StartX, the nonprofit accelerator for Stanford-affiliated start-ups, launched its latest group of companies Wednesday in Palo Alto, Calif. The companies ranged widely, working on everything from e-commerce to ear wax.

Like other incubators such as Y Combinator, StartX, formerly known as SSE Labs, has a program where companies get mentoring, advice and other resources. But unlike other private incubators, SSE Labs does not take an equity stake in the companies. The program is organized and run by Stanford students.

Founded in 2009, the program has grown quickly. To date about 1,000 people representing 287 companies have applied for the program and 24 companies have been accepted. In its most recent batch, 107 companies applied and only nine were accepted. Today the group changed its name to StartX so that it sounds less like a laboratory, said Cameron Teitelman, founder of the group.

The demo day, held at AOL’s offices, was packed with investors interested in finding the next big company from the school that hatched Google. Advisers and sponsors for StartX include Charles River Ventures, AOL, Intel Capital, Greylock Partners and General Catalyst Partners.

Juntos Finanzas is a personal finance service specifically targeted to help immigrant Latinos manage their money. The service came out of a class project at Stanford’s D School Institute of Design. The students met with janitors at Stanford who are generally immigrants from Mexico and asked them about how they use money. They found that the janitors had a lot of anxiety over how to manage their money–virtually all of them did not have bank accounts and just used cash.

So Ben Knelman and his team developed a budgeting and money management service that is completely SMS-based. Users text to record transactions. The janitors used the service for six months and saved an average of $1,400 over six months on annual incomes of $40,000. The service is similar to Mint.com in that it helps people track their transactions, but it is targeting specifically those who use only cash. Knelman hopes to expand beyond this demographic group to the “unbanked” more generally. Companies like Greendot and Paynearme (which I’ve covered) have shown the business potential in cash payments.

“I love Mint but to give me useful information I really have to use online banking or credit or debit cards,” Knelman says. “If you use cash foremost… all the industry tools are completely inaccessible.”

Qwhispr is a stealthy social search company with an interesting founding team. Co-founder Eldar Sadikov previously worked on search at both Google and Microsoft. Now he’s developing a new type of search engine, because typical keyword search does not work adequately for social search, he says. The service taps into services such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare and Yelp, grabbing not just relevant content but relevant people to a search.

“Social search is very different from web search,” Sadikov says. “In web search you try to find similar documents to a query. In social search you find the authors of documents and the relationships between them.” Watch this one.

6Dot Innovations provides technologies for the blind to type using a special braille keyboard and labeling kit. The keyboard has six buttons and looks a like some kind of large Star Trek remote control. But it could provide real world benefits. Many blind people take the wrong prescription medicines because they do not have braille labeling, says co-founder Karina Pikhart, a Stanford graduate student. But 6Dot’s tools make it easy to create these labels. In addition to selling direct to consumers, the company hopes to sell to businesses such as supermarkets, pharmacies and schools. The company is looking to close a $100,000 seed round and launch its product toward the end of this year.

PredictiveEdge is an ecommerce service that brings dynamic pricing to any online retailer. The company was co-founded by a former Amazon.com employee who worked on pricing issues. The company just needs a web retailer’s past pricing history and it can suggest the best price to both be low enough to attract purchases but high enough to make the most money out of each transaction. It’s a data intensive, algorithm-based technology that is doing beta testing with websites now. Its modeling works best in verticals with similar products like electronics, as opposed to things like fashion.

WifiSlam is an indoor mapping and GPS company. GPS devices don’t work indoors because satellites are not accessible. But what if you’re lost in a big indoor space like a shopping mall, hospital, or convention center? WifiSlam can quickly map out these locations using wi-fi sensors that are in mobile phones. The company has been testing it at Stanford hospital, which is so big that even some doctors can’t figure out how to get around.

Kitchit is a marketplace for professional chefs. The company matches chefs with consumers who want to set up private dining events such as weddings, graduations, or home entertaining. For chefs, Kitchit provides tools for chefs to manage their businesses so they can focus on cooking. The local food space includes Grubly, Gobble (which I covered here), Grubwithus (which is more to meet people) and others.

GameClosure is a stealthy cross-platform mobile gaming company that focuses on HTML5 games. The interesting part is that because it’s focused on browser-based games it can work on the iPhone, Android or basically any browser. The company recently closed angel financing. Others such as Gree, DeNa, EA and Zynga are looking into offering similar HTML based games but GameClosure is further along than any of them, says co-founder Tom Fairfield.

Leglytics is a legal document search engine. It’s designed to be simpler than others such as Lexis Nexis. The company has a visualization tool that shows the most relevant cases to a search as dots on a screen, arrayed by how they are related to a search. The service can plug into other document repositories.

Clear Ear is a medical device company that provides what it says is a more effective way to clear ear wax. This is–who knew?–a big problem for many people. Instead of shooting water into your ear 20 times–the typical medical procedure for solving the problem–Clear Ear’s device provides a more efficient way to clear your ears. The company also wins the prize for scariest demo, with massive photos of ear wax in its slide deck.

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